New Form of Narration

Coming from a computer science background, I always looked at things from a design and innovate side of things. I find history to be very different to computer science. In the world of computer science, we’re always taught to look for the problem and find a solution. Usually the problem is something that already exists. A problem that someone else already “fixed”. But people in computer science are too lazy or find it inefficient to use the existing “solution”. So they decide to create their own solution by innovating. This is the reason why there is an app for everything you can think of. In the reading, Writing History in the Digital Age, I understood it that in the world of history, the method of telling the story is the same until historians are forced to adopt another method. Historians never create a new way of narrating the stories. They use the same methods that existed in their field until other fields introduce a new method. For example, “Mathematics, natural sciences, and social sciences that employed statistics were at the forefront of the development of charts and graphs.” Meanwhile in computer science, we’re taught to look for new ways.

The reason why products are always developing in the field of computer science is because there is a user feedback system. User feedback became popular recently. For all apps that exist, there is a review section. The users get to rate the product and give written reviews on the app and its performance. Whether people praise it or not, it gives direct feedback to the developers. The developers know exactly what the consumers want so they can produce the product the consumers are looking for.

If there was a way to constantly improve the way historians tell the story, possibly adopting the user feedback method would be a place to start. However, there’s the question of whether or not the method of presenting the history needs to constantly change, and what benefits there is to changing constantly. I can’t see what kind of improvements you can make as frequently as an app’s software update to improve the delivery of the history. With technology constantly growing, it will create a new form of delivery. Possibly a form of hologram, or virtual reality (VR) since VR is exploding in the tech world right now. Or simply another software like R that will help analyze statistical data in an efficient way.